


PYRRHIC

by heartbone (ergo_existence)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, CONTENT WARNING: death, Endgame, M/M, Themes:, Yep.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:55:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9551861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ergo_existence/pseuds/heartbone
Summary: There is only so much a human is able to take.





	1. AB IMO PECTORE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's almost midnight.
> 
> i had feelings, and wrote this out in maybe half an hour? forty minutes?  
> i know this is a hot reverse from CIRCADIAN RHYTHM. forgive me.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac4eM99BUHI listened to this for all of it.  
> purity ring - stillness in woe
> 
> EDIT 28.02.2017: preserving original notes. the second chapter, much like the first, is, too, an emotional hasty outpouring.

Panting and choking out wet blood from his throat, Prompto throws his gun into the blue aether, or he would have, if the gun hadn’t thumped to the floor with resounding finality.

“Ah,” Ignis says.

The daemons are slain, the last battle they would fight in the struggle against Ardyn—or what he hoped would be. There, before him, with his weary limbs and years and years hanging on them, victory sits.

Victory’s cost is too much.

Their final stand—Gladiolus, Ignis, and he all reunited once again—had drained whatever was left of him. A decade in melancholic waiting for the king to come striding in with his sword and his grin had been all Prompto had clung to. The man with the power to end it all.

And ended it was. Barren bar for the remnants of Ardyn’s malformed creations, Insomnia stands despite falling, and there is a new beginning waiting around the corner. That beginning they had all waited for, the reset to fix the world anew.

“Do you think,” Prompto tries to start, running a hand down to his calf to feel the soaked Crownsguard uniform, red, “he’s…”

It’s always him asking if Noctis is okay. Always that niggling thought at the back of his head, that itch to check for him. He can’t even shake it now. Old habits die hard. So do kings.

None of them say a word.

So, despite his wounds and his spirit that feels as if it’s been consumed, he drags a foot up the stairs where their journey had first begun. He remembers standing here, at the start of their road-trip, with all the surety he had ever felt beside Noctis.

His movements are as if he’s forgotten his feet and how to control his movements; _move_ and _can’t_ rebound in his head and, like all humans who take _can’t_ as a reason to try, he tries again.

One more. Just one more.

He coughs, and sputters, and feels mortality rich in him, reminding him that he could lose it all in a minute. Not pushing on is unfathomable. Every part of him prays for his body to summon energy.

The energy comes from sheer force of will.

When he reaches the top, he nearly loses it right there with the minor triumph. Again, he coughs. He’s never felt this weak, this cut up, not since that long, long, long time ago he was in a cell and he had a barcode on his wrist that still haunted him.

This is the person he is now, crawling little would-be hero trying to drag himself back to his best friend. Because the world is singing his dirge, and Prompto will join in.

“On my way,” he says, and regrets it, as the effort of using his oxygen to say it weakens him further. He can feel his lungs ask him stop, his heart joining the conversation with insistence: that sharpness of a hunter’s spear in his chest, but there is nothing there. Just an old pain and longing.

Behind him, he can register Gladio and Ignis suffering, but there is one goal.

The throne room comes from before history wrote itself, when words were simple and hands were complicated and the kings of Lucis knew more about blood than they did about gold. Prompto weakly smiles to himself, as he smears his own crimson mess across the ground—if he had the strength to turn his head, maybe he’d see his blood like a snail trail.

It’s an excruciating minute after minute, where he pulls himself—forces himself to get up on fawn legs, feels himself slip. He pushes on adamantly because there is no other forseeable option. It simply is.

Noctis is dead.

Vainly, he’d hoped against everything he had been told. Hoped against that last, horrific goodbye. Hoped against the relentless tide of death.

“You,” he says, forcing himself up, body coming out of the womb with its weakness, “Noct.”

Swallowing up his own guts that have lost their tether, found their way into his throat, his messy and ungainly hand comes up to rest on Noctis’ cold cheek. He smears it with his own muddied hands that had cupped his wounds. Where Noctis’ blood has stopped, his own pulses out too quickly.

There he leans against the sitting corpse: golden-haired and dark, king and commoner, almost and almost.

“I loved you,” he stutters out, words collapsing, too late. The sun, that thing older than all, breaks through the high, imposing stained windows of the throne room. “I never told you.”

That’s his loss. Too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me at http://www.twitter.com/4chanpriest  
> yell at me about promptis. talk to me about pain.  
> also on http://www.eschebone.tumblr.com  
> i'm feeling a lot right now.
> 
> all i basically live for is to commiserate about or extol the stuff i share and the world i'm in love with. let me know if it affected you in any way. it's...got me in a mess.
> 
> EDIT 28.02.2017: preserving original notes. still feeling a lot. (:


	2. ACTA EST FABULA PLAUDITE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not intended for a part two, but muse is rarely logical. only discipline can be trained.
> 
> SUBTITLE: Campfire of the End 
> 
> MUSIC: i listened to silence, oddly enough, perhaps converse to how i generally write. i could hear nothing, and perhaps that silence undid me.

Noctis is scattered.

All his parts split—his parts as in: his lungs vacating themselves to breathe air for themselves, his ribs to hold up the blue above, his heart to beat for somebody else. Or maybe it had always been doing that. It’s not with him, anymore, anyway. He has never felt so motionless in his life, never felt like what it was to _stop._

No force. When his eyes, which are still his own—maybe all he has, with his mind and his splintered body—open, open greedily to drink in whatever he has been given in this dormant drifting, he instantly understands.

There was no victory. There was no victory for him. He’s only a winner in the sense he wore a crown, as somebody in first place does, as the one who claims the spoils would. As a tyrant claiming a kingdom would with his army and commanding power.

Noctis is broken, a crack in the wall and the foundations. A gauge in his stomach. Or there is no stomach, and this is his confusing penance for existing.

There’s spirits he feels in the cracks between him and the air, distant whispers and glimpses of _others_ , the manner which his hands would simmer and stir as he wielded the Armiger or walked the halls of the palace. Existence building upon existence until it ripped apart and left a gaping abyss of all that had once been and no longer did.

He has joined with such.

But, if he focuses, if he summons up all his memories and the courage that dwells from death-drifting existence and foregoing the cautiousness that the will to live instilled, the nothingness swirl of banshee darkness becomes something else.

The night is dark, the same as the knowledge of death—but the fire burns. It’s a heat that he can’t process except he knows the _memory_ of singeing his fingers, of letting his feet get too close to the heat and having to shuck his shoes off.

They, the round table, sit in their camp-chairs and contemplate one another as if this is only before and not after. Noctis is procrastinating on the final battle—this is a good substitute, a healthy dose of reality mixed with a dream. A hard chair, wet shoes. Seeing them all again.

This is what it feels like to be dead. To assume the state of nonexistence. Noctis had felt it in sleepy amble to the end, a dirge for his own funeral.

He was only free of his chains in the afterlife and if that is not the cruellest of existences. He is one of the ones who went to the other side because they were _cornered,_ because the building was burning and he was up high and he had to jump. He had to jump.

He is an amalgamation of his memories and world and the sphere he lived in, and here he is, in his reduced sum.

Here’s the memory of the person he loved. The feet between them is a representation of the space apart somewhere else where he is on a throne and then his silver-toothed friend is warding off daemons and he’s slumped and he’s alive. And he, he, he.

A yawning mouth between them, sharp canines of reduced oblivion and absolution.

Noctis doesn’t know how many moments he plays out: _I’m sorry,_ he says once, as if they had not all walked into this despite their curbed existence based on his birthright.

 _Let’s do this, then_.

Again.

_We can win.  
_

Because victory may prove to mean something for them. If only he had said it.

And then, after so many, maybe in this dreaming apparition as a dead star, he says, _you guys…were the best_.

Close.

If he looks at Prompto, that pickled smile, the fermented shoulders, the muscles come into age that he was not there for, that he lived out nightmares in between—if he looks, in all his own disjointedness he sees an image come to life. No: the image does not come to life because he is dead. But in this confusion where he can act out anything, maybe he could find a form of his own consolidation in the bow of his lips and unchanged hair.

The static nature of him, Prompto waiting as the same person, that period as a sentinel begetting the shadows under his eyes to the lack of rest he found _waiting_ , all so Noctis could find him again as this incarnation. So he could shamble through the edges of the sundered land and his own self and find this recognition amongst the cutting nature of loss.

So he could remember him so easily.

Again.

“I guess I wanted to ask for more time,” he says, and he blinks. Sometimes the embers from the campfire drift listlessly and irritate his eyes, but he can’t remember that now. He’s focussing on other details, like the placement of Prompto’s freckles and moles. It’s always those he hones in on, if he recalls correctly. It’s them, then the nose, then the curve of his neck. The Adam’s apple.

“More time? Isn’t this the end?” he would say in this doomsday imagining. Prompto is maybe too pessimistic in this setting, but Noctis remembers his sobbing into his hands and yes, this is what he’s been left with.

“I thought I didn’t have any left.” It might be true for the context, even then.

“We go to sleep soon, Noct. Then it’s…well, you know.”

“We do,” he muses, because this _is_ his sleep.

“You look too amused about it, bro.”

“Don’t _bro_ me.”

Prompto tries for humour. “I think it’s a little late to start calling you king, don’t you think?”

“Definitely too late.”

 _Too late,_ he thinks, and doesn’t that just describe them. With the heartbeat to a heart in a corpse that will sit alone on its throne, the dream almost becomes real, despite.

“I loved you,” Prompto says, and it might be precariously balanced and not at all in the way Prompto would say it—joyful, vibrant, pulsing with emotion, where this is a broken chord—yet Noctis basks in the meandering pretend.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments are always, always, always appreciated. i love hearing from people. you make my day, that we can bond over this
> 
> say hello to me on twitter. (http://www.twitter.com/4chanpriest)  
> i'm not scary. i tripped on my way to a seat in a uni lecture today and left the stove on for twenty minutes this morning with an empty hotplate. i thought i locked myself outside of my new place but i was holding the keys in my left hand with my umbrella.


End file.
